Maria Lassnig Prize 2025

Having herself gained fame as an artist only late in her career, it was Maria Lassnig who suggested the idea of a prize. The aim of this distinction is to make the work of fellow artists known to a wider audience.

»In just a few years, the Maria Lassnig Prize has become a respected award given to mid-career artists that acknowledges their extraordinary talent and the need for greater recognition”, according to the jury.
 

»Today Maria Lassnig is regarded as a unique, important figure in the history of modern art«, says Peter Pakesch, Chairman of the Board of the Maria Lassnig Foundation. »Her venturesome work was not recognised internationally until very late in her career and following years of struggle. All her life she championed other artists and colleagues. In her final years, she spoke of her hope of finding a way to reward mid-career artists with the public attention and recognition which they merited. It was in this spirit that the Foundation initiated the Maria Lassnig Prize. 

The unique structure of the Prize is a key element in realising Maria Lassnig’s wishes: by collaborating with a leading international institution, it is possible to ensure the best platform for the winner. The Hamburger Kunsthalle plays a central role in the reception of Maria Lassnig’s oeuvre in Germany, with various early purchases under former director Werner Hofmann at the beginning of the 1980s. The cooperation on this Prize is thus particularly gratifying!«

Carrie Yamaoka (born 1957, Glen Cove, NY) is an interdisciplinary American visual artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. She engages with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Chemical processes and fleeting states of transformation play an important part in her work, in which the possibilities of recording and documentation are challenged.

Yamaoka is interested in the (in)ability of photography to capture and depict. In some cases, the artist alters her earlier works five, ten or twenty-five years later, thereby challenging fundamental conventions and hierarchies in artistic production. The reflective surfaces blur the lines between studio, exhibition space, artist and viewer, between production and completion.

In her text-based early work, Yamaoka worked with typewriter correction ribbons, a material used to rectify mistakes. In text and material, the visibility of erasures becomes an essential element of her work.

Yamaoka´s diasporic roots have deeply informed her work. Her hybridized heritage is that of Japanese immigration to the US dating back to the late 19th century into the early 20th century, mixed with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants on one side of her family. Living in Japan during her teenage years was a formative influence on her work.

Yamaoka is a member of the queer art collective fierce pussy, which she co-founded in 1991 and that is still active today. The collective emerged amidst the AIDS epidemic and political mobilisation for LGBTQ+ rights. The other members are Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla and Zoe Leonard.

Yamaoka’s exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in summer/autumn 2026 is her first solo show in a German museum.

Other outstanding artists awarded the Maria Lassnig Prize in past years include Cathy Wilkes (2017, MoMA PS1, New York), Sheela Gowda (2019, Lenbachhaus, Munich), Atta Kwami (2021, Serpentine Galleries, London) and Lubaina Himid (2023, UCCA Beijing).

The jury, consisting of the Chairman of the Board of the Maria Lassnig Foundation, Peter Pakesch, the Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Alexander Klar, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London), Matthias Mühling (Director of the Lenbachhaus, Munich), Rosa Barba (artist), Brigitte Kölle and Corinne Diserens (Heads of Contemporary Art & Exhibitions Curators, Hamburger Kunsthalle), played a key role in choosing the winner.

 

»It is fantastic to have Maria Lassnig feature twice at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2026: first, at the end of March, in a major retrospective pairing with Edvard Munch, and then when things get handed over to Carrie Yamaoka«,  said Alexander Klar, Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

About the Maria Lassnig Foundation

The Maria Lassnig Foundation is dedicated to promoting and supporting the reception of the work of Maria Lassnig and its impact on contemporary art and artists. By means of initiatives such as the Maria Lassnig Prize, the Foundation aims to acknowledge and pay tribute to mid-career artists who have made major contributions to art and merit greater recognition.

Website: www.marialassnig.org

Hamburger Kunsthalle

Founded in 1869 by citizens of Hamburg, today the Hamburger Kunsthalle is home to one of the most pre-eminent collections of art in Germany. It is among the few museums that enable a journey through eight centuries of art history. With the permanent display of the renowned collection holdings and regular temporary exhibitions, the Museum illustrates developments in art from the Old Masters, Romanticism, impressionism and classical modernism to the present day.

Spanning 5,600 square metres, the most recent part of the Kunsthalle building is the Gallery of Contemporary Art, that was designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers and inaugurated in 1997. One of the largest exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Germany, the Gallery boasts an exhibition programme with a truly global outlook consisting of collection displays, artist projects and temporary exhibitions. 

Artists in the collection include numerous figures from international art, including Francis Alÿs, Etel Adnan, Nina Canell, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Maria Lassnig, Cady Noland, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Paul Thek, Thu van Tran, Rosemarie Trockel and Haegue Yang. The Hamburger Kunsthalle gains international attention with special exhibitions attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Hanseatic city every year. An important part of the Museum’s work is to bring its holdings to a diverse audience by means of a richly varied programme combing aspects of art and society.

Website: www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de 
 

Carrie Yamaoka (born 1957, Glen Cove, NY) lives and works in New York City, USA.

In 1988, she received a grant from ArtMatters. In 2017 she received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and in 2019 she was named a John Simon Guggenheim fellow in the field of fine arts. Yamaoka has been showing her works in numerous international exhibitions since the 1980s. Upcoming solo shows include See-Saw at Anonymous Gallery, NYC (19 June 2025—9 August 2025).

Yamaoka’s works have been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA PS1 (New York), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Fondation Ricard (Paris), the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Participant Inc. (New York), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Grey Art Museum (New York) and MassMOCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Her work has been covered in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula and BOMB.

Her works are held in various museum and public collections, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Sunpride Foundation, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

She is represented by the following galleries: Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), Kiang Malingue (Hong Kong/New York) and Ulterior (New York). The monograph RE: Carrie Yamaoka is set for release by Radius Books in July 2025.